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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

"Christianity Today" and Paul

CT recently published an article http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/august/13.22.html "about" the new Paul persective (see earlier posts). I put the word about in quotes instead of putting the NPP in persective to indicate what I thought of the article. If that is all anyone experiences as an introduction to the NPP, they will wonder what the fuss is about, and I doubt they will make it through the article anyway. Now I know my NPP is way to the left along the wide spectrum of NPP interpretations, but the whole issue of the Romans "mis/translation" of the word "belief in Jesus" merits the serious attention it gets in academic biblical scholarly circles and not to even mention it, or to dismiss it by overtly indicating it can't be an issue, doesn't speak well for the evangelical mission of being taken seriously. I read the article and wondered why would anyone think the NPP is controversial or foundational. And the list of recommended resources is pretty slim and doesn't do the NPP justice. I was left thinking that it was all an excuse for some evangelicals to say they could now dismiss the NPP by having shown a small slanted piece of it.

But this post will allow me to reveal myself as a regular reader of CT and that it helps in my own journey in surprising ways. And I would like to particularly point people in this latest issue to the related artifcles on the "Attack Dogs of Christendom" who over-react (could they do anything else, one wonders?) to the recent spat of atheist arguments, and to John Wilson's top 5 books on Atheism which evangelicals would do better to read than the recently published ones: Lucretius' on the nature of the universe, Sartre's Nausea, James C. Turner's Without God, Without Creed, Timothy Larsen's Crisis of Doubt, and Philosophers Without Gods, ed. by Louise M. Antony. Wouldn't it be great to see the UU World, for example, run various people's lists of their picks of the 5 top books coming from the perspectives of, for lack of better terms, evangelical orthodox Christianity, progressive Christianity, emerging Christianity, theology today, personal memoirs of faith today, Buddhism, neo-paganism, etc. today?